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A striking feature of Jaques' work is his “no nonsense” attitude to the “manager‐subordinate” relationship. His blunt account of the origins of this relationship seems at first sight to place him in the legalistic “principles of management” camp rather than in the ranks of the subtler “people centred” schools. We shall see before long how misleading such first impressions can be, for Jaques is not making simplistic assumptions about the human psyche. But he certainly sees no point in agonising over the mechanism of association which brings organisations and work‐groups into being when the facts of life are perfectly straightforward and there is no need to be squeamish about them.

Discusses the concept of “integrating management” with respect to the development of a new approach to training in the Dutch Department of Public Works; tertiary technical education is no longer enough as training for managers facing interdisciplinary problems, as the Department changes from a functional to a product organization. Describes the present and future altered organizational structures. Describes how job and training profiles were developed from the literature, analysis of data about the target population and their training needs, collected by interview and questionnaire, and a crucial two‐day workshop to test the validity of the results and to draw up the profiles.

This monograph seeks to summarise the key influences of a role‐based perspective on leadership when making decisions as to how organisational resources can best be deployed.

Application of new frameworks provides insight into the leadership roles executives can adopt when part of formal, informal and temporary groups within the organisation's senior management team and those parts of the organisation for which they are responsible. The methodology adopted is qualitative, focusing on application of previously developed frameworks.

Adoption of an appropriate leadership role, and the timely switch from one role to another as circumstances change, are found to facilitate improvement in the ability of executives to mobilise organisational resources, and in so doing effectively address those challenges with which the organisation is faced.

A one‐organisation intensive case study of a multinational engineering company engaged in the design, development and manufacture of rotating turbomachinery provides the platform for the research. The research intent is to validate two frameworks in a different organisation of a similar demographic profile to those in which the frameworks were developed. The frameworks will require validating in organisations of different demographic profiles.

The concepts advanced, and implications discussed, provide an insight into the role‐based nature of leadership. The practical steps individual executives can take to develop their ability to adopt different leadership roles are highlighted.

This monograph is an investigation into, and study of the contribution of theory that provides insight into, the process by which executives effectively mobilise organisational resources. This differs from the original contributions to theory, which focused on methodology, data gathering and validation in contrast with the current study that is focused on practical application.

The purpose of this empirical study is to identify the job tasks where decisions regarding social responsibility are likely to occur and assess the potential connections between social responsibility and professionalism.

A job study conducted by the Universal Public Procurement Certification Council (UPPCC) of 2,593 practitioners is used for data collection. Factor analysis is applied to a set of 75 procurement job tasks to determine the relationship between practitioners’ performance and management of job tasks and social responsibility variables.

The results suggest that there are specific job tasks performed and managed in both public and private sector procurement that share a unique relationship with social responsibility variables.

The manuscript advances the research on professionalism in procurement and administration through empirically testing job tasks performed and managed by practitioners and identifying relationships between job tasks according to a professional orientation toward social responsibility.

The study shows that specific job tasks are performed and managed in procurement and administration with a social responsibility consideration.

The technical nature of job tasks found to be related to social responsibility suggests a paradoxical view of the politics-administration dichotomy, and the notion that neutral tasks of both the public and private sectors are not void of a social function.

One attribute of professionalism in the literature, social responsibility, is operationalized through actual performance and management of job tasks by practitioners.

As personalized work arrangements, idiosyncratic deals can activate employees’ energy and thus affect their innovative performance. The purpose of this study was to examine whether employee vitality mediates the relationships between two different types of idiosyncratic deals and the innovative performance of employees and whether the mediating effects are moderated by employees’ age.

Matched data were collected from 620 employees and their direct supervisors who work in two large Chinese technology R&D organizations.

Results indicate that two different types of i-deals (task and work responsibilities i-deals and flexibility i-deals) are positively related to the innovative performance of employees and that vitality mediates those relationships. Further, chronological age enhances the positive relationship between task and work responsibilities i-deals and vitality, and it enhances the indirect effect that task and work responsibilities i-deals relate to the innovative performance of employees through vitality. However, the results of this study indicate that the moderating effect of chronological age on flexibility i-deals and vitality, as well as the moderated mediation effects of vitality on the relationship between flexibility i-deals and the innovative performance of employees, did not meet the standard for significance.

Based on the cognitive evaluation theory, this study explores more deeply the mechanism by which task and work responsibilities i-deals and flexibility i-deals activate employees’ energy and thus influence their innovative performance. In addition, this study comprehensively considers the moderating effect of chronological age, an important demographic variable, on the mechanism of idiosyncratic deals.

The purpose of this study is to analyze the relationship between the performance orientation of employees and self‐promotion in the form of overstating one's performance. It is hypothesized that this relationship depends on task clarity and personalized responsibility.

Data were collected by means of a survey among 281 employees of two Dutch organizations, one active in water management, the other in the justice field.

As expected, a positive relationship was found between performance orientation and self‐promotion, but only when task clarity was low. Personalized responsibility appeared to reduce the strength of the relationship between performance orientation and self‐promotion, but only under conditions of low task clarity.

Inducing high levels of task clarity seems to be generally effective in reducing self‐promotion. If it is not possible to increase task clarity, personalized responsibility is a second best option to reduce self‐promotion

The focus on high performance in modern organizations tends to induce employees to promote themselves as excellent performers. Performance‐oriented employees are especially known to react in this way while they can simultaneously be assumed to refrain from any behavior that is likely to be noticed as self‐promoting. Therefore, it can be hypothesized that factors that can enhance the visibility or traceability of self‐promotion will lead to a reduction in self‐promoting impulses. In the current study, two such factors, task clarity and an employee's personalized responsibility, have been investigated.

The social innovation of devolving HRM responsibilities to line managers results in many debates about how well they implement HRM practices. The implementation constraints line managers perceive in their HRM role are researched by taking organisational contingencies into consideration.

We present four case studies in which our findings are based on quantitative and qualitative data from the cases. The qualitative data allow us to explain some of our quantitative results in terms of organisational differences.

The HRM implementation effectiveness as perceived by line managers depends on the line managers’ span of control, his/her education level and experience and his/her hierarchical position in the organisation. Each HRM implementation constraint knows additional organisational contingencies.

We did not consider possible influences of one organisational characteristic on another, and the effect of this combined effect on the HRM implementation factors. In order to overcome this limitation, we would suggest using a structural equation model (SEM) in future research.

This chapter offers HR professionals solutions on how to structure the organisation and design the HRM role of line managers in order to implement HRM practices effectively.

We see many differences on how HRM implementation is managed in organisations. This chapter offers solutions to policy makers on how to equalise the HRM role of line managers.

The focus of this chapter is on the line manager (instead of HR managers) as implementer of HRM and the impact of organisational contingencies on HRM implementation.

The purpose of this paper is to remove confusion surrounding the terms responsibility and accountability from the general and project management arenas by creating “refined” (with unnecessary elements removed) definitions of these terms.

A method of deriving refined definitions for a group of terms by ensuring that there is no internal conflict or overlap is adopted and applied to resolve the confusion.

The confusion between responsibility and accountability can be characterised as a failure to separate the obligation to satisfactorily perform a task (responsibility) from the liability to ensure that it is satisfactorily done (accountability). Furthermore, clarity of application can be achieved if legislative and organisational accountabilities are differentiated and it is recognised that accountability and responsibility transition across organisational levels. A difficulty in applying accountability in RACI tables is also resolved.

Clear definition of responsibility and accountability will facilitate future research endeavours by removing confusion surrounding the terms. Verification of the method used through its success in deriving these “refined” definitions suggests its suitability for application to other contested terms.

Projects and businesses alike can benefit from removal of confusion around the definitions of responsibility and accountability in the academic research they fund and attempt to apply. They can also achieve improvements in both efficiency and effectiveness in undertaking organisation-wide exercises to determine organisational responsibilities and accountabilities as well as in the application of governance models.

Refined definitions of responsibility and accountability will facilitate building social and physical systems and infrastructure, benefitting organisations, whether public, charitable or private.

Clarity resulting in the avoidance of confusion and misunderstanding together with their consequent waste of time, resources and money.

Responsibility and accountability are central to much of what managers do, but in the literature these complex social science concepts are confused. The paper aims to bring theoretical rigour, structure, consistency and parsimony to this field, using as an example the subcategories of responsibility referred to as corporate social responsibility (CSR) and global responsibility.

This conceptual paper analyses and identifies overlaps, redundancies, gaps, limitations and flaws in current constructs of responsibility and accountability. Using this as a base, we propose a responsibility and accountability matrix comprised of eight constructs, which in turn underpin a process model in which responsibility precedes accountability.

The eight constructs are shown to be sufficient and necessary to explain: the nature of the obligation that one party has to another (role, legal, ethical and moral responsibility); the responsibilities and accountabilities that arise from decisions, actions and behaviours (causal, judged and felt responsibility; external and felt accountability); and how these responsibilities differ from constructs that define the ambit of responsibility (personal, team, corporate, social and global responsibility). This then forms the basis of a proposed generic process model of responsibility and accountability that shows how the discrete and sequential stages of the process typically unfold, and how the responsibility and accountability constructs proposed above relate to each other and to the various process stages. It argues that concepts of CSR and global responsibility, poorly defined both in practice and in the literature, can be better understood when these eight constructs are applied to them.

To underscore the practical implications of the theory, it shows, by reference to the model, how CSR and global responsibility can play out in the case of banks. However, being a generic model, it extends to many other applications in management and the social sciences.

The proposed model is highly original, clarifying, augmenting, categorising and integrating concepts of accountability and responsibility. The paper is also original in providing a framework for reducing CSR and global responsibility to their constituent first‐order constructs.